IF – Grounded

I haven’t drawn anything new in about fourteen hundred months and now I suddenly have to draw a bunch of stuff in the three days that I have left before school starts back again. I mean, the issue where I only have three days left is my fault, although I spent most of the other days working on other stuff that at least at the time seemed nearly as important as drawing (but probably wasn’t). Anyway, since I mostly forgot how to draw over the course of the many long months I already mentioned, I needed to do a practice drawing, and so this is it.

Of course, as usual I didn’t have a ton of brand new ideas for what exactly to draw, so I kind of just grabbed a random paperback off a random shelf and obviously just plagiarized the heck out of it. The one sort of good thing I learned was, that font I keep seeing on old Ballantine covers is probably ATF News Gothic, which I have a version of, so that’s nice I guess. There are lots of little differences between the News Gothic on my machine and the real thing, but not enough to make me think I got the ID wrong, although I could totally still be wrong. The one big difference I noticed was in the quotation marks. Mine don’t have that extra little doodad on them that they seem to have in the ATF version. They end up being pretty small on the final image, though, so it doesn’t matter all that much. But it might matter later, so I’ll keep looking for a closer match.

Meanwhile, every time I try to mimic Richard Powers (which is 90% of the times I sit down to make something), I learn all over again how impossible it is. Which is kind of cool, actually. Like, it just goes to show what a wildly individual style he had. I mean, even if you can make a big list of all the obvious influences and everything, even so…there’s just no way to do what he did because only he could do it. Meanwhile, I’ll continue looking for a style of my own, I suppose. Maybe I’ll find it in the next decade or two.

FYI: the Powers cover shown in the second image is from 1966.

Oh, and the last thing is, I seem to draw a lot of spaceships that are falling from the sky. Like, the ancient Quantum cover from 1991 clearly has pretty much the exact same idea as the thing I did this afternoon. Which shows how few ideas I’ve got. The nice part of the old piece is, it contains an actual humanoid type of figure, which I ought to include in more of my work. Just doing weird shapes floating around isn’t quite enough to get a viewer’s attention. You have to have some sort of an actual person in the mix.

P.S. Once I’m done with the fake XYZPDQ Press name, the official name will be Falling Rocket Press, because last night I figured out how images of falling rockets are commentaries on various things, plus there’s a handy built-in Whistler reference, too…which is especially nice because Whistler’s Falling Rocket painting was disliked by a lot by critics, and by one critic especially, which makes me like Whistler a lot, even though that sounds kind of counterintuitive, even to me.

P.P.S. Actually, though, the real name will probably be something 100% different from any of the 100 names I’ve scribbled in my notebook.

Words I Like

The way you drop is like a stoneMaking out you're flyingBut you've just been thrown.

—The Jesus and Mary Chain, "Drop"

There was a book in the library about Holland. There were lovely foreign names in it and pictures of strangelooking cities and ships. It made you feel so happy.

—James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

In fact, while we read a novel, we are insane—bonkers. We believe in the existence of people who aren't there, we hear their voices, we watch the Battle of Borodino with them, we may even become Napoleon. Sanity returns (in most cases) when the book is closed.

Is it any wonder that no truly respectable society has ever trusted its artists?

—Ursula K. Le Guin,Introduction,The Left Hand of Darkness

"What are my dreams?"

—Jerri Blank

Being a famous artist in the Culture meant at best it was accepted you must possess a certain gritty determination . . . .

—Iain M. Banks,Excession

"I hope you will consider what I arrange, but be skeptical of it."

—John Berger,Ways of Seeing

Some sort of pressure must exist; the artist exists because the world is not perfect. Art would be useless if the world were perfect, as man wouldn’t look for harmony but would simply live in it. Art is born out of an ill-designed world.